Imagine that here were two ways of living life: one where you could see everything clearly and one where you could not. What would the impact of living in either world be?
The clear one would allow for total clarity to know everything, no guesswork on the facts; only blissful cognition.
The other one… it’s a mystery, an enigma. So what do you do if you’re in a room and blindness is practically how you live? You start feeling around, bumping into things, eventually get a feel for the room, and try to venture out. Though what might be gained from this? Life lessons.
The first lesson you learn is how to figure out where obstacles are with the least amount of pain to get there. Falling to your face with every other step has a tendency to do that.
The next is how to anticipate where things will be: the wall, door, furniture, etc. The lessons continue on endlessly, but eventually an appreciation starts to develop of how things are placed and the place’s design. You actually “live” the space much more instead of merely knowing the place.
The same would be true for many areas of life: how people think, what harms and helps; what grows and shrinks a person.
Now imagine that there was a system that allowed you to learn those lesson much earlier and not fumble around in the dark as much. This system is morality.
Morality is a system that is rooted in an understanding of what is fundamentally right and wrong.
Why should you care about what’s right and wrong?
Well for starters tripping over a table because you can’t see it would be a wrong step – probably involved some pain too. If you had known everything, would you have made that mistake? The lesson of actions, even unwitting ones, having consequences is one of the most enlightening pieces to figure out early.
What if someone came to you, in this blind state, and offered to tell you how to navigate the dark room? Would you believe such a thing is even possible? After all, all you know at this point is that you can’t see where you are and you’re constantly running into things – its the life you know.
Say you believed and listened to this person, they would tell you techniques about using a walking stick, hand movements, and maybe even human echo location (yes that is a thing). Your life would be vastly improved! You can now more safety and confidently navigate the world around you. Trips and bumps will still happen, but your personal abilities and strength to get up and actually get to your destination allow you to live a more successful life. You still learn life lessons, but much faster now that you have a way to navigate.
Morality is much like this. There some ways that are fundamentally helpful or not in not only living a good, satisfying life, but in also being a good and satisfied person. Morality has a way of building up the soul, making it bigger and stronger.
To ignore them makes the reality no less real, it just means that you suffer more consequences – of which there are many kinds. It could be harming another person through selfishness or harming yourself through not being honest with yourself.
To chose blindness with morality, as opposed to simply knowing everything, is really a choice to live life in the most alive way. The other options are endless stumbling or practically being a computer database. What do you want?
Yes, living a moral life spares us a lot of pain. It also spares others around us a lot pain. It helps good things to go forth and be accomplished. It allows us to feel good about ourselves and the way we interact with others. And the knowledge that we have done the right thing.